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Monty says beware of MySQL 5.1 GA

MySQL 5.1 has made it to "general availability" (GA) but MySQL's creator has already contradicted the claim that it is ready for production use. Michael "Monty" Widenius has, in a personal blog posting entitled "Oops we did it again – MySQL 5.1 released as GA with crashing bugs", Widenius advises caution for all users thinking of deploying the new version of the open source database.

He points to the at least twenty bugs that cause crashes or improper result in MySQL 5.1.35, 180 serious bugs and 300 less serious bugs, already in the 5.1 bug system, and lists fifteen bugs he thinks should have been fixed before the release of 5.1. With this in mind, he suggests that users who want to upgrade to 5.1 as a "better 5.0" approach with care, and possibly leave it some weeks while early patches arrive. Users who want to make use of new MySQL 5.1 features are advised to treat the new features as a beta release. One group he does advise to use MySQL 5.1 is new users, because 5.1 is, according to Widenius, better than the 5.0 community version, which hasn't been updated for some time.

Widenius, in the lengthy posting, examines the quality of 5.1, explains what he believes went wrong in the development process and suggests that the future of MySQL development should be in opening up the development process to the community, who he feels have been starved of opportunities to test 5.1, let alone contribute to its development. He concludes by saying "There are two ways things can go: If MySQL 5.1 works for a lot of people and not too many get serious crashes and data losses, then I was concerned without a good reason and everything is fine. If MySQL 5.1 does have some serious problems and people report them, the bugs will be fixed and the MySQL & Sun management will have more information to not repeat the same thing with MySQL 6.0."